Quotes from Alfred de Musset

I don't know where my road is going, but I know that I walk better when I hold your hand.

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream

L'homme est un apprenti, la douleur est son maître. Et nul ne se connaît tant qu'il n'a pas souffert. C'est une dure loi, mais une loi suprême, vieille comme le monde et la fatalité, qu'il nous faut du malheur recevoir le baptême et qu'à ce triste prix tout doit être acheté...

What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.

A happy memory is perhaps on this earth truer than happiness itself.

I deeply wished I could make the stars all come down and breathe them; disappear in them

The heart that once has been your shrine for other loves is too divine

J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie, Et mes amis et ma gaieté; J'ai perdu jusqu'à la fierté Qui faisait croire à mon génie. Quand j'ai connu la Vérité, J'ai cru que c'était une amie ; Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie, J'en étais déjà dégoûté. Et pourtant elle est éternelle, Et ceux qui se sont passés d'elle Ici-bas ont tout ignoré. Dieu parle, il faut qu'on lui réponde. Le seul bien qui me reste au monde Est d'avoir quelquefois pleuré.

There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter's flaming wings

What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.

Look at the sun! It's dry, it's dead, it needs a drink, it wants blood! And I'll give it blood!

Is is true that dictators never dream because they can change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer

Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest

If love is a play, this play, as old as the world, fiasco or not, it is, all in all, the least bad thing that has so far been found. The roles are trite, I admit, but if the play had no value the whole universe wouldn't know it by heart

Your name, merely your name, floods my brain to a point of sweet disgust.

Quelquefois, il y a des sympathies si réelles que, se rencontrant pour la première fois, on semble se retrouver.

Elle aurait aimé, si l'orgueil Pareil à la lampe inutile Qu'on allume près d'un cercueil, N'eût veillé sur son coeur stérile. Elle est morte, et n'a point vécu. Elle faisait semblant de vivre. De ses mains est tombé le livre, Dans lequel elle n'a rien lu.

L'humanité souleva sa robe et me montra, comme à un adepte digne d'elle, sa monstrueuse nudité.

el beso es el contacto de dos epidermis y la fusion de dos fantasias...

During the wars of the Empire, while husbands and brothers were in Germany, anxious mothers gave birth to an ardent, pale, and neurotic generation. Conceived between battles, reared amid the noises of war, thousands of children looked about them with dull eyes while testing their limp muscles. From time to time their blood-stained fathers would appear, raise them to their gold-laced bosoms, then place them on the ground and remount their horses.

Then came upon a world in ruins an anxious youth. The children were drops of burning blood which had inundated the earth; they were born in the bosom of war, for war. For fifteen years they had dreamed of the snows of Moscow and of the sun of the Pyramids.

Le mal existe, mais pas sans le bien, comme l'ombre existe, mais pas sans la lumière. Evil exists, but not without the good, as the shadow exists, but not without the light. (III, 3)